By the mid-1960s, Twentieth Century Fox had acquired the rights to the DC comic hero Batman from ABC television and entrusted production to William Dozier and his company Greenway Productions. ABC were still going to broadcast the resulting series and all involved were expecting a straight-faced action series along the lines of the popular Adventures of Superman (1952-1958). But Dozier, who wasn’t a fan of comics, read a few issues and watched a revival of the 1943 Batman serial by Lambert Hillyer. He was taken aback, so the story goes, by the audience’s riotous reaction to the deadly earnest serial and concluded that the only way to approach a new version was to adopt a deliberately campy approach, inviting audiences to laugh a the character’s intensity and sincerity as the audiences as chortled at the 1943 version.

His original plan was to shoot a feature film to act as a pilot for the series for Fox weren’t too keen – a feature film was a labour intensive and expensive undertaking compared to a twice weekly half-hour television series so refused the idea. But Dozier remained keen and when the first season of the television programme took off (it’s easy today to forget just how big the show was in its first two years) he revived the idea. The result was a theatrical feature film, often erroneously listed as Batman: The Movie (it was never actually called that on screen) directed by Leslie H. Martinson, who had directed the first twinned season episodes (every week’s double episodes formed a mini-serial with rhyming title) The Penguin Goes Straight and Not Yet, He Ain’t.

Gotham’s most feared villains, The Joker (Cesar Romero), The Penguin (Burgess Meredith), The Riddler (Frank Gorshin) and The Catwoman (Lee Meriwether) join forces under the banner United Underworld and abduct Commodore Schmidlapp (Reginald Denny) to get hold of his new invention, a device that dehydrates anyone it’s aimed at. From their headquarters aboard a “pre-atomic” submarine (which comes complete with flapping fins and a penguin face) the gang also kidnap millionaire Bruce Wayne (Adam West) hoping to lure Batman and Robin (Burt Ward) into a trap, unaware that Wayne is really Batman. Eventually they set in motion their plan to dehydrate the members of the United World Organization’s Security Council. Can Bruce Wayne escape and save the day as Batman?

While the television series had felt like the parody of the 1943 serial that it was, the film version feels rather like it’s parodying the television series that spawned it. Everything about the small screen incarnation is amped up to 11, the script is peppered with in-jokes, outlandish action scenes and deliberately silly coincidences and happenings. It’s hard to entirely dislike a film as likeably daft as Batman but it’s not without its problems. At a 104 minutes it’s well over its natural length – what worked so well in two 25 minute episodes a week suffers greatly when stretched to such ridiculous lengths. It paves the way for those later bloated superhero films in which one villain wasn’t enough so the hero gets to take on several at the same time, inevitably diluting the presence of the supervillains ranged against him (it was always a him). Here, Lee Meriwether (replacing Julie Newmar) as The Catwoman does the bulk of the heavy lifting with The Penguin, The Joker and The Riddler all fighting for attention.

One of the joys of the film – and there are many – is seeing Meriweather, Meredith, Romero (whose painted-over moustache was always one of the comedy highlights of his portrayal of The Joker) and Gorshin cavorting around the pop art sets like sugar-crazed toddlers playing at dressing up, untethered from the restrictions of adult interference. The sheer energy of their performances is endearing even if the length of the film makes them a bit grating by the end.

So while it outstays its welcome and while the script by series regular Lorenzo Semple Jr feels like several small screen episodes bolted together not entirely successfully, there’s still so much to enjoy about Batman (though corner a hardcore fan of the comics and they’ll regale you at length about its many shortcomings). There’s something hilarious and strangely comforting about Adam West’s strange, halting, almost William Shatner-like delivery of lines like “Someone Russian is going to slip on a banana and break their neck!” or “Apples into applesauce – A unification into one smooth mixture. An egg – nature’s perfect container. The container of all our hopes for the future”. And Burt Ward’s boundless and often misplaced enthusiasm (“Holy Polaris!”, “Holy Long John Silver!”, “Holy heart failure!”) is never lass than amusing.

Other familiar faces from the television series are present and correct, among them Neil Hamilton as Commissioner Gordon, Stafford Repp as Chief O’Hara, Madge Blake (very briefly) as Aunt Cooper and of course Alan Napier as the ever-faithful retainer Alfred (who goes on a stakeout mission with Robin wearing a mask beneath his pebble glasses). Van Williams, star of that other popular 60s crime-fighting show The Green Hornet (1966-1967) – which Batman crossed over with in it’s second season – lends his uncredited voice to the role of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The array of “Bat” accessories is eye-rollingly silly, from the “shark repellent Bat sprays” (The Batcopter comes equipped with a range of “oceanic repellent Bat sprays” to see off Barracuda, whales and manta rays) to the Batcycle that just happens to be barely hidden behind a bush exactly where the Dynamic Duo need it to be. The shark scene is a classic comedy moment (“holy sardine!”) and it’s hard not to smile at the sight of West and Ward briefly running through a New York crowd (“we’re in top-top physical condition” quips a notably podgy West) to the bemusement of unsuspecting onlookers. And those fondly remembered onomatopoeic sound effects turn up on cue during the fight scenes, particularly at the climax.

One of the most fondly remembered moments is Batman’s increasingly fraught attempt to dispose of a bomb at the seafront, running around trying to avoid babies in prams, a courting couple, some ducks, nuns and a Salvation Army marching band (“Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb!”) Something very similar – Batman trying to get an explosive device out of harm’s way on the waterfront – was played out in deadly earnest at the climax of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012).

Batman purists are still going to flinch at the very mention of the television series and this accompanying big screen spin off but if you’re looking for an antidote to the relentless bleakness of more recent Batman big screen adventures you won’t find anything more diametrically opposed to that approach than this gaudy, unapologetically silly affair. You’ll get restless in the last third as the villains’ drawn-out plot rumbles slowly to its inevitable failure but there are enough sight gags and ludicrous situations to keep you giggling throughout.

West and Ward lent their voices to a couple of animated follow-ups many years later (Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders (2016) and Batman vs. Two-Face (2017)) and such was the enduring popularity of the series that in 2013, after decades of trying to play down the campiness of the show and restore some dignity to the Dark Knight, DC Comics finally welcomed it back into the fold with a comic titled Batman ’66 which ran for 30 issues and formally introduced some of the small screen villains to the comics.